The Daily History Chronicle

On July 6, 1967, Nigerian federal troops crossed into Biafra, beginning a two-and-a-half-year war that killed up to three million people, most of them children, most of them from starvation caused by a military blockade. This is not a story about simple villains. Nigeria had a legal case. Biafra had a survival case. Britain sold arms. France ran a covert supply operation. And a massive humanitarian airlift saved lives while inadvertently prolonging the very famine it was trying to end. The Nigerian-Biafran War invented modern humanitarian intervention, and every debate we still have about blockades, sovereignty, and the right to protect civilians traces directly back to what happened here.